gs
are."

"Then come along home with me, dearest, and perhaps I shall. I am
overburdened--and you, too, are unhinged just now." He put his arm
round her and lifted her; but though she came, she preferred to walk
without his support.

"I don't dislike you, Jude," she said in a sweet and imploring voice.
"I love you as much as ever! Only--I ought not to love you--any
more. Oh I must not any more!"

"I can't own it."

"But I have made up my mind that I am not your wife! I belong to
him--I sacramentally joined myself to him for life. Nothing can
alter it!"

"But surely we are man and wife, if ever two people were in this
world? Nature's own marriage it is, unquestionably!"

"But not Heaven's. Another was made for me there, and ratified
eternally in the church at Melchester."

"Sue, Sue--affliction has brought you to this unreasonable state!
After converting me to your views on so many things, to find you
suddenly turn to the right-about like this--for no reason whatever,
confounding all you have formerly said through sentiment merely!
You root out of me what little affection and reverence I had left in
me for the Church as an old acquaintance... What I can't understand
in you is your extraordinary blindness now to your old logic. Is it
peculiar to you, or is it common to woman? Is a woman a thinking
unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer? How you
argued that marriage was only a clumsy contract--which it is--how you
showed all the objections to it--all the absurdities! If two and two
made four when we were happy together, surely they make four now? I
can't understand it, I repeat!"

"Ah, dear Jude; that's because you are like a totally deaf man
observing people listening to music. You say 'What are they
regarding? Nothing is there.' But something is."

"That is a hard saying from you; and not a true parallel! You threw
off old husks of prejudices, and taught me to do it; and now you go
back upon yourself. I confess I am utterly stultified in my estimate
of you."

"Dear friend, my only friend, don't be hard with me! I can't help
being as I am, I am convinced I am right--that I see the light at
last. But oh, how to profit by it!"

They walked along a few more steps till they were outside the
building and she had returned the key. "Can this be the girl," said
Jude when she came back, feeling a slight renewal of elasticity now
that he was in the open street; "can this be the